For his film-score follow-up to There Will Be Blood, Jonny Greenwood has chosen Tran Anh Hung's adaptation of Haruki Murakami's coming-of-age novel Norwegian Wood – a cult success globally, but a cultural landmark in Japan. Dealing with troubled adolescents in a sanatorium, it offers Greenwood plenty of scope for mournful progressions, bleak mist-curtains of strings, and more daring strategies like the looming dissonances lurking like massing insects beneath "Naoko ga Shinda", realised here by the BBC Concert Orchestra and The Emperor Quartet. A couple of tracks feature delicate tracery of classical guitar, but the most baffling feature of the album is the inclusion of three old tracks by Can, which possess a lightness, and dynamic character somewhat absent in the rest of the score.

"The eight songs here are less like an album and more like two EPs in a set: one of spectral, understated ballads, and the other of spectral, understated takes on left-field electronic music." nymag.com

Thom Yorke's dance begins in silhouette before building to a convulsive climax. The latest Radiohead video, "Lotus Flower", has amassed more than 3.5 million YouTube hits since being uploaded on Friday. It looks like the nervous jitters of a madman. It is, in fact, the delicately choreographed work of one of modern dance's greatest talents.

Is there another music critic writing today who could change key within an essay from John Dowland to Led Zeppelin (specifically, "Dazed and Confused"), JS Bach to Robert Johnson, without fluffing the notes or tumbling into an ear-splitting dissonance? Alex Ross of the New Yorker can span endless octaves of period and genre without the slightest sign of strain. Those particular leaps between Renaissance dance and song, and the pillars of hard rock, come in a bravura piece on the chaconne and its offshoot the lamento: a descending bass line "like a chilly staircase stretching out before one's feet". Such strands of musical DNA migrate from epoch to epoch, culture to culture. They crop up as foundation and inspiration with a fertility that makes a nonsense of moribund divisions between the "pop" and "classical" traditions.